


All Things Unspoken

by metacrisis_chook



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Edward's POV, Episode revisit, Gen, I'm bad with tags, My First AO3 Post, My First Work in This Fandom, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Parental Riza Hawkeye, Parental Roy Mustang, Parental Royai, Riza and Roy as the Elrics' siblings/parents sort of, Royai - Freeform, The Ishvalan War of Extermination, Young Royai, i guess?, is it wholesome enough (cries), the 520 cenz promise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:14:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24012667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/metacrisis_chook/pseuds/metacrisis_chook
Summary: My strange interpretation of how Ed might feel about having Roy and Riza in his life, after learning their plans to change the country and what that would entail. Revisiting Ed and Riza's conversation from FMAB episode 30 (The Ishvalan War of Extermination) from Ed's POV, slight mention of young Royai. Originally posted as 'Ed needs his Royai Parents' on Tumblr
Relationships: Edward Elric & Riza Hawkeye, Edward Elric & Roy Mustang, Riza Hawkeye/Roy Mustang
Comments: 16
Kudos: 109





	All Things Unspoken

_When Edward heard about Mustang’s team being scattered, he realized that the situation was worse than he’d imagined. Roy had broken the news to them with a stony expression, his eyes hardly ever leaving Bradley’s, whose face was unreadable. And when the latter begun ‘subtly’ threatening Edward into silence by mentioning Winry - his blood still boiled at the memory - he knew he was in no position to bargain. He thought about the Colonel again, and Hawkeye’s forceful appointment as the Fuhrer’s personal assistant, and had no doubt Bradley had taken just as much sadistic pleasure in breaking the news to Mustang and watching whatever fight that had been left in the man drain out. Sick bastard._

_Mustang had left without much of a word to the two brothers after they’d taken leave from the Fuhrer. True, their minds were still reeling from the shock of the events, and Edward’s own thoughts had been fixated on checking up on Winry as fast as he could (he mooched a few cenz from the Colonel immediately for the phonecall). Mustang had momentarily gone back to his usual self and snapped at him as he handed over the coins, but Edward didn’t miss the split second the Colonel’s facade fell as he turned in the opposite direction and walked away, the empty space beside him glaringly obvious._

Evening has fallen now, and Edward is quite tired. Trudging through an endless abyss ankle deep with blood, bones and debris of centuries-old civilizations for an indefinite amount of time, and having to practically disintegrate himself and two others to escape from said abyss, has understandably taken a toll on his body. Yet, his mind remains restless. He doesn’t think he can manage to sleep at all, not until he does something productive, because every second that passes without action feels wasted, which in turn makes him feel even worse. Finally, Edward decides that he will pay Hawkeye a visit. He has to return her pistol anyway, but it also gives him an excuse to go and see her.

He isn’t sure how his sudden arrival will be taken, though - he certainly doesn’t want to bother her - and his awkwardness grows when Hawkeye appears at the door with damp hair and a jacket thrown hurriedly over her shoulders, obviously getting ready to call it a day. Edward apologizes for intruding at the late hour, and has half a mind to simply hand over the weapon and leave, but Hawkeye waves his apology aside and welcomes him. Extracting himself from under Hayate, Edward follows her inside and takes a seat at the table in the living room. He accepts her offer of coffee, and while Riza busies herself in the kitchen, Edward has nothing to do except idly take in the surroundings while scratching Hayate’s ears.

It’s a small apartment, modestly furnished, with barely any decor to hint at the Lieutenant’s personal life. Edward guesses she hasn’t bothered to add many personal touches because she probably doesn’t spend much time here at all, being stuck in the office for long hours. Work definitely follows her home, as evidenced by the piles of reports stacked neatly in the hallway. A houseplant sits in the corner by the heater, and Edward spots a few books atop a small cabinet in the far side of the room. The place doesn’t exactly have an ideal ‘home’ atmosphere to it, but it isn’t completely devoid of personality - it’s actually quite warm and comfortable, and neat, a perfect reflection of the meticulous nature of its inhabitant. Ed doesn’t think he’d be able to call a military-assigned quarter home either. His heart remains in Resembool, where he was born and grew up with his brother, a place far away and very different from the rigid life in Central. He wonders what the Lieutenant’s life might have been like before the military. His own was quite good, even with the traumatic events he and Al had to go through. There’s plenty of happier memories to recall and be grateful for, and the ocean of photographs carefully kept by Grandma Pinako in the Rockbells’ residence stand as proof of those days - 

His eyes snap into focus as they land on something- a small, rectangular object on the cabinet, sitting inconspicuously beside the books he had seen before. Edward is surprised, because it is a little framed photograph - so Hawkeye had chosen to keep at least one personal memento after all. He’s tempted to walk to it to see it up close, but decides against going directly for something so personal, and obviously treasured, uninvited. Even so, Edward is still curious, and it’s not that far from him, so he cranes his neck to get the best glimpse that he can from his respectful distance.

His eyes can make out the faces of two children. A little girl with short, fair hair that fell over a side of her face and her eyes, very much like it did so today. Beside her, a slightly taller boy, with a mop of black hair and the most exuberant expression on his face. Edward inhales sharply. He’ll recognize that cheeky grin anywhere - and apparently, it is something that too has remained unchanged after so many years.

Hawkeye’s voice rings across the room, asking Ed if he’ll take milk or sugar with his coffee, snapping him out of his reverie. He whips his head away from the general direction of the photograph as he stammers a no, hoping she hasn’t noticed anything.

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

They chat over coffee for a while, updating each other on recent events. It’s quite pleasant being able to talk to Hawkeye in such a relaxed atmosphere. She seems at ease with herself too, speaking more freely and also surprising Ed with her occasional dry humor, a side to her he didn’t know about before. At work, she has always been Lieutenant Hawkeye, stern and professional, though not unkind. Right now, she can almost pass off as his older sister (with the added bonus of having blond hair; and while they aren’t golden like Ed and Al’s, her sherry eyes have their own resolute glint in them). The thought makes him both warm and a little embarrassed at the same time.

At one point, Edward brings out her pistol, and has another round of embarrassment when he realizes it is still splattered with blood from inside Gluttony’s stomach - he ought to have cleaned it a bit before returning it. Riza doesn’t comment on it though, but brings out her tools onto the table and begins the meticulous cleaning procedure herself, starting off with disassembling the weapon carefully. Edward looks at it morosely. It doesn’t seem even remotely dangerous now, nothing more than bits and pieces of metal lying harmlessly in a little container of water. “Looks like things got pretty serious,” Hawkeye comments, noticing Edward’s eyes on the gun. “Yeah,” he replies wearily. “But I didn’t use it..I didn’t have to.” He stops, his mind flashing back to that moment. “Well…” the words start forming a lump in his throat. “I couldn’t pull the trigger.”

Riza stops to look up at him. Edward feels like he’s shrinking. _Useless._ Like he felt back then, with the gun in his hand but unable to pull the trigger. He says as much to the Lieutenant, who asks him to elaborate. It’s hard, but he slowly recounts the whole incident. When he mentions the bit about Scar, Hawkeye’s hands pause momentarily, but she doesn’t interrupt him, and the words keep tumbling out of his mouth, just as his mind relives the memory frame by frame. _Scar. Winry, her face unrecognizable with rage and the pain. The gun in Winry’s hand. Edward himself, suddenly in between the Ishvalan and the girl with her finger on the trigger. Winry, as she clung on to him, her body doubled up in grief, racking with sobs, the wailing still fresh in his ears._

“I’ve got no resolve. I only manage to make things worse.”  
“You’re just dwelling on this stuff because you made it back alive.”

Edward looks up. Hawkeye is wearing an expression that he can’t quite place. “You need to stay focused on living. That’s how you’ll help Winry.” Her words are directed towards him, but they have a strange feel to them as well, almost like something that has been said before, well-rehearsed, like a mantra. “How else can you protect her?”

His mind clicks, but he says nothing, excusing himself from replying by taking a sip from his coffee. He tries not to look back at the cabinet on the other side of the room.

“..I mean, after all, you love her, don’t you?”

Having successfully spit his coffee out and his defense mechanism kicked in, Edward goes on a rampage of denial, barely processing the words coming out of his mouth. His natural impulse during any confrontation has always been to hit back with something that makes the other person equally uncomfortable, and had it been Mustang instead of Hawkeye he was dealing with at the moment, Edward is sure he would have jabbed at the Colonel with a similar question. But it’s Hawkeye, for whom he has an entirely another level of respect (and possibly, fear) that automatically deters him from most impulsive behavior.

Besides, given the current circumstances, he supposes it would be verging on cruel if he joked about whatever goes on between her and Mustang. It’s more or less an undisputed open secret among their close circle, which is fine. The danger never lies with friends, but when even the enemy is able to put two and two together and use it for their own disgusting agenda. And with the newfound revelation that the two go way further back than he’d imagined, Edward feels even more miserable and outraged than ever at Bradley’s sick game.

Eventually, Edward shuts up, and Riza changes the topic, though not to a particularly easier one. He doesn’t like how cold she sounds when she says she’s past feeling sorry for herself, and he can guess what hardened her so much that she feels beyond redemption, even before he pops the question to her. Bringing up Ishval is not a comfortable decision, but Ed decides to use this rare opportunity to learn more about the war from an actual veteran. Besides, he couldn’t hope for anyone else to answer all his questions with the same level of brutal honesty as hers.

And Riza does exactly that, narrating the whole incident from start to finish; she tells him about the country itself, its forceful annexation to Amestris, how tensions ran high and the dreadful incident that finally caused the war to break out. Edward’s hands clench themselves tight remembering Envy’s arrogant face as it relished the memory of impersonating the officer advocating for the Ishvalans, and shooting the little girl in cold blood, almost hysterical with laughter reminiscing the bloodbath that had followed. But if that wasn’t already bad enough, Riza tells him about the horrendous Executive Order 3066; it really was no war, it was a cold, calculated, mindless extermination. “It was like hell on earth,” Hawkeye says, her voice hollow. “The air was tainted with the smell of human decay, and the desert sand soaked up the blood like a sponge.” Edward’s stomach turns as he hears the words, and he wonders if he has done the right thing by asking Hawkeye to relive the traumatic experience, but she doesn’t show any signs of stopping. He doesn’t even think she’s here with him in the present.

“Most combat is blind. A normal soldier might fire erratically without a clear target in mind..but it’s different for snipers.” He fingers curl around the pistol, now fully reassembled. “Someone is sure to die when we pull the trigger. Where other soldiers don’t have a direct line of sight on the effects of their actions, snipers do. And, of course, the State Alchemists.”  
Edward doesn’t think he can bear to look at anything at all at the moment, not even at his own murky reflection in the coffee that has gone cold in his cup. His thoughts go back to the photograph on the cabinet, trying to imagine the two children with their smiling faces thrown into a blood-soaked battleground. He pictures the boy watching as buildings fifty times bigger than his own size become engulfed in flames and crumble at his feet, debris raining down upon his small figure. He imagines the little girl’s razor sharp gaze stare unblinkingly through a scope, as a bullet pierces through yet another nameless face that she’ll never forget. His stomach twists into a painful knot. 

But the most shocking revelation is yet to come. Edward feels like the ground has been snatched away from under his feet as Riza tells him about Roy’s plans to reinstate democracy in the country, and signing their own death sentences in the process. Ed has never envisioned an optimistic ending to the path he and Al set for themselves, but even with all the obstacles in their way, all the deaths they’ve had to endure and the knowledge that there may be always more in the road ahead, not even in the darkest outcomes conjured up by his brain has he ever considered that Roy and Riza might not be there in the end.

It’s not that he isn’t aware of the constant danger their lives are in by default; such is the nature of their job, now made worse after getting themselves entangled in the conspiracies they never should have discovered. Conspiracies that apparently somehow revolve around Ed and Al, and neither the Colonel nor the Lieutenant should have had anything to do with it - their lives weren’t centered around the two boys. Except, somehow it was.  
Looking back, it dawns upon Ed that Mustang and Hawkeye have been there from the moment his and Al’s life took a new turn after their mother’s demise and the failed transmutation; in fact, they were the very ones who pivoted the boys’ lives in that direction, appearing at their doorstep one day and opening a new world of opportunities with Edward’s appointment in the military. And their help has not stopped coming ever since; Mustang has tactfully prevented as much official duties he can from unnecessarily falling upon Ed’s shoulders, Hawkeye has constantly supplied him with all the research materials he has ever asked for, getting him clearances to even the most obscure reports leveraging the Colonel’s credentials whenever required. 

Most importantly, neither of them has ever breathed a word of the brothers’ strongly guarded secret to anyone; the truth came out to their close circle in the military only by chance, when Scar had crossed paths with Ed and almost succeeded in killing him after crushing Al’s armor to the brink of disintegration. Even on that day, the brothers had been able to narrowly escape death solely because the two had intervened at the last moment with an entire team of soldiers. Hawkeye covering his shivering body with her own uniform’s jacket while his brain was still numb from the shock of almost dying; Mustang riling up the military all over the place, breeding mass confusion with false news of Scar to help capture Gluttony without drawing attention, and Hawkeye risking recognition while personally transporting the crew and the captured Homunculus to the safehouse - these are only few of the countless times Edward can recall the two stepping in to help them without hesitation.

They’ve always been there, whether it be in the front lines or behind, but always present, to the extent that they’ve become an inseparable part of his existence over time. He has grown accustomed to it so much that he has hardly ever questioned their involvement in his affairs. The notion of his life without Mustang’s incessant jabbing or Hawkeye’s unfailing kindness is the same as trying to imagine his life without Al as practically his own shadow or Winry as the glue that held both of them together - unnatural and almost inconceivable. Now that he is suddenly faced with the very prospect, no matter how far in the future, Edward almost feels like he is seven again, terrified and desperate to find a way to make everything right.

But life doesn’t unfold in the way he wants it to - his priorities are never the center of the universe, and he knows he is being selfish for wanting things to remain safe and familiar, for wanting to hold on to people tightly when they have already devoted themselves to a perilous path in order to make things right for everyone else. And he knows it’s almost hypocritical of him to want them to not see things through to the end, when he himself is trying to accomplish something similar and will never give up as long as he’s still breathing.  
Edward knows he _can’t_ give up, now that he has made it this far, after all that he and Al have endured to get here, after all the sacrifices the people he cares about have made for them in the past and continue to make every day despite having their own lives set ablaze.

_You don’t have time to start worrying about us. Your hands are already full._

But knowing what has to be done doesn’t make it easier. It doesn’t make him any less scared. It’s never fair that people must pay a price often bigger than what should be asked of them. It tears his heart to not be able to be there for everyone at all times, to have to set them aside because he is forced to choose his priorities. But if that is the only way forward, Edward will take it, even if he has never stopped being terrified and always too afraid to let his fears show, because he will do anything he can to hold onto the ones he loves. He had risked his life to see his mother smile again, and given up his arm to save his little brother.

And he feels like he’s clutching at straws once more, as he hangs around Hawkeye’s front door, doing his best to extend their conversation, as he refuses to pay back Mustang his 520 cenz until he becomes Fuhrer and vows to keep robbing the man even further. He hopes that they don’t, and that they do, understand what he’s so desperately trying to do - putting off the goodbyes he doesn’t have the heart to say.

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This is probably the most strangely written thing you've ever laid eyes on 😂 I'm not much of a writer; even if I have hazy ideas floating around in my brain, they are never put into words, and at some point insecurity kicks in and makes the whole process harder. This is the first ever thing I've completed writing in a long time, and that too not very original since it's more or less the events of ep 30 written from Ed's POV in the most redundant way possible, and it has taken every ounce of my courage to post it on a platform like this. In fact, it's my first ever post on Ao3 ^^' If you've read it, thank you so much, I hope it wasn't too bad. I also apologize if you were looking for some more originality, and I hope you'll excuse all the errors in the writing.
> 
> The piece was previously posted on my obscure tumblr sideblog as [Ed Needs His Royai Parents](https://the-royai-household.tumblr.com/post/616042178301640704/ed-needs-his-royai-parents) , I've reposted it on Ao3 with a (hopefully) better title just in case. You could check it out on Tumblr because I used screencaps from the episode, which makes the whole thing easier to follow ^^
> 
> I have another similar episode re-exploration posted on AO3, ["In Between the Lines"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24089092) , which is more Royai-centric, you could go check it out as well ^^
> 
> Thanks again~


End file.
